In this week’s stock market outlook, Joel Wenger examines the current market trend, price performance, and headline risks.

                                                            The month of June 2026 is another month of dividend income landing in my accounts.  Due to becoming debt free, I changed my pay myself model. Starting the beginning of August 2021, I am paying myself 30%, just like before. This will now consist of […]

Every month since 2017, I have written an article that shows the growth of our passive income. In the last few years, I’ve included a monthly update on the year’s goals. I had gotten later and later with these goals until the May one, when I just skipped it altogether. At the start of the month, I was finishing up taxes and preparing for travel. The travel was 11 days, and by the time I […]

As much as I might not want to admit it, I’m a sucker for complicated tax technical issues. See my writings here and here.  Recently an odd issue has come up: does income created by an in-plan Roth conversion count as modified adjusted gross income for purposes of determining eligibility to make an annual Roth […]

Americans hold more than $19.2 trillion in IRAs (individual retirement accounts). So it’s likely you’ll end up inheriting one. And that’s definitely good news. The catch: In most cases, you have to completely empty the account within ten years. And depending on the type of IRA and what kind of beneficiary you are (more on that in a minute), you could end up dealing with a much bigger current tax bill than expected. But, still, […]

I’ve been a self-directed investor for almost thirty years. Self-managing my investments has saved me tens of thousands in fees, though I’ve been susceptible to my own investment biases and mistakes. Overall, I believe the tradeoff favors do-it-yourself (DIY) investing.   This article explores the pros and cons of DIY investing compared to hiring a financial… The post The Pros and Cons of DIY Investing appeared first on Retire Before Dad.

As stocks have hit new all-time highs in recent months, I’ve seen an increasing number of people argue that stocks aren’t becoming more valuable, the dollar is becoming less valuable. Investor Lee Roach articulated this “debasement theory” in a recent Twitter/X post: The federal government is running a 7% structural deficit with no political coalition in either party willing to address it. The Treasury is issuing debt at a pace that will push publicly held debt-to-GDP past 130% within five years, which is the level at which, historically, every government in recorded history has either inflated its way out, defaulted, or both. The Fed is, regardless of what it says in public, the marginal buyer of that debt, and the only mechanism it has to fund the purchases is the creation of new dollars. The money is being printed. The debt is being monetized. The currency is being debased. And asset prices, which are denominated in the currency being debased, are doing the only thing they have ever done in any country that has ever tried this, which is going up… The lesson is not that asset prices are going up because the businesses are getting better. The lesson is that asset prices are going up because the unit they are measured in is getting smaller, and any investor who positions short against this dynamic is betting against the will and capacity of a government to debase its own currency, which is the single most reliable bet you can lose in 4,000 years of recorded monetary history…. The only investors who will, in real terms, preserve and grow their wealth are the ones who understood, early, that the game is not about being right on valuation, it is about being on the right side of monetary debasement, and the right side has always been owning real assets, productive businesses, scarce commodities, and the one monetary metal that has functioned as money continuously for 5,000 years, while the people on the other side continue to insist this time is different. This time has never been different. The math is the math. The shorts will continue to lose. The owners will continue to win. Despite a few factual errors (e.g., Japan, the U.K., and other countries have gone beyond 130% debt-to-GDP without hyperinflation or default), Roach makes some valid points. For example, the U.S. government does have a spending problem that neither party can resolve. This is mostly due to large entitlement programs (like Social Security) that are extremely difficult to reform. For example, even if we uncapped the payroll tax (to apply above $184,500 in income for 2026 and beyond), about one-third of the funding shortfall for Social Security would remain. Why campaign for something so politically unpopular when it won’t solve the problem anyways? Additionally, Roach is right that, on a long enough timeline, inflation destroys a currency. And the best way to fight inflation is owning real, productive assets. Just Keep Buying, am I right? But this is where